A client recently approached me with the question of whether they should shrink their Microsoft Dynamics GP databases to reclaim hard disk space, but instead of telling you what I think, I will demonstrate some of the issues arising from shrinking your databases: Now to what I think...I have never been a big fan of shrinking databases to reclaim hard disk space -- though, if you are running a dev environment where space is critical, then this may only be the one time. The problem arises from the way the shrink process occurs, and applies to DBCC SHRINKFILE , DBCC SHRINKDATABASE and the Auto Shrink setting in the database properties. In summary, SQL Server goes to the end of a dabatabase file, picks up each individual page, then moves them to the first available empty space in the file. This process may reverse the order of your pages, turning perfectly defragmented indexes into perfectly fragmented ones. So, let's take a look with a test database in one of my client's ...
